Each year, the KAEF Graduate Fellowship program receives over 100 applicants for eight fellowships.  Hundreds more applicants begin the online application process but drop out before the final deadline.

What this means is that the competition for the fellowship is fierce.  As a talented, motivated professional, you don’t want to waste time applying to a program for which you have no chance.  How do you know whether or not your application is “good enough” to warrant all the effort?

There are two basic answers to this question:

• KAEF selection is conducted by a panel of impartial university admissions experts, and not by KAEF staff.  We set up selection this way in order to avoid any conflicts of interest and maintain the impartiality of the process.  Ultimately,  the committee determines the quality of each KAEF application.  Seeing as how the committee is comprised of staff from university admissions departments, you can expect your application to be judged with criteria similar to those used by many U.S. institutions of higher education.  Those include, but are not limited to:  your work experience, your mastery of English, your other test scores, your interview performance (should you get to the “round”), your essays, your past academic performance, and your recommendations.  As you evaluate your own application, try to evaluate these parts of your application as objectively as possible.
• To a large extent, your application will be as good as you want it to be.  Those that spend a lot of time and effort writing essays, securing good recommendations, preparing for tests, and giving deep thought to their career goals and objectives will tend to have strong applications.  Those, on the other hand, who try to complete the entire process in a three-day period before the deadline will tend to have very poor applications.  As in many things in life, you tend to get back what you put in.

In short, there’s no way to know for sure whether or not your application “has a chance” other than applying.  But you can improve your chances by taking your time and putting in the effort to make your application the best it can be.

Table of Contents for “Should I Apply to KAEF?”

• Introduction
• The short answer
• Understanding the commitment involved
• Will your application be competitive?
• What host universities want
• Are there minimum requirements to be considered?
• Research can improve your chances
• Evaluating your career development
• Having a backup plan
• What if you don’t get it?

Today, I just wanted to go through a basic list of “Dos” and “Dont’s” for the interview.  A lot of this material has been implied in what I’ve written over the past week; but still, I wanted to get it all in one place:

• Do: Be friendly. Smile, make eye contact, laugh. By being friendly you will relax the interviewers and yourself, and create an easygoing atmosphere in which it will be easier to share information about yourself
• Don’t: Overdo it. Don’t try to hard to make the interviewers like you by telling jokes, flirting, or being overly familiar. These tactics will make the interviewers uncomfortable.
• Do: Be Honest. Interviewers are good at what they do, and they can usually sense when you are being disingenuous. Remember, you may not be right for a program – the interview can help you know.
• Don’t: Be plain. Yes, tell the truth. But tell it with some style. Think about how to tell your story in a way that sounds impressive. Don’t make things up, but do make sure you make the truth sound good.
• Do: Be Talkative. The interviewers want to hear what you have to say. They don’t want to hear one-word answers to questions. Be sure to elaborate on your answers and share as much information as possible.
• Don’t: Talk forever. Tell the interviewers everything that is relevant to the question, but do not talk forever. Interviewers are working on a tight schedule.
• Do: Ask Questions. Asking questions about the program shows your interest and also demonstrates that you have thought about what it would mean to participate.
• Don’t: Think that your questions “don’t count.” If you ask a question that shows you are totally ignorant of the program (or unsuitable for it), interviewers WILL TAKE NOTE.
• Do: Relax. The interview is not the most important thing in your life. It may not even be the most important thing in your application. So relax. You’ll do better anyway.
• Don’t: Relax about basic professionalism. Don’t be late. Don’t dress casually. Don’t slouch in your chair. Don’t use casual forms of speech or conversation. “Relax” does not mean “You can forget about politeness.”
• Do: Know what you want and why you want it!!! The basic question behind every interview question is “What do you want and why?” You should think about this for a long time before you go to the interview.
• Don’t: Be insistent and inflexible. Knowing what you want doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible about other possibilities. Candidates who are insistent and inflexible raise a red flag for interviewers.

Today we’re going to talk briefly about how to prepare for an interview.  The reason we’re going to talk briefly is that there is not too much that you can do to prepare yourself for the interview process.  In fact, one of the dangers of preparing at all is that you might overprepare. So let’s start there, discussing the hazards of overpreparation.

Overpreparation is what happens when you envision a set of questions which you’ll likely be asked, and then construct, ahead of time, an actual answer for each question.  A candidate who is overprepared will tend to avoid the actual questions and instead provide the answer he or she has prepared – even if that answer goes with another question!!!  This candidate will provide very beautiful, literate answers – but they won’t be to the questions asked.  And that, obviously, is bad.

So, when we say “prepare,” the most important thing to remember is that we don’t mean for you to craft response ahead of time.

What, then, is good preparation?

There are two steps I think you could take that would be helpful:

First, review your application.  Read your essays, read your recommendations.  Many of the questions you will be asked will have their point of origin in your application, so the more informed you are about it, the better.

Second, spend some time reflecting on the reasons behind your decision to apply to the program.  Try to get behind your reasons to the premises that underlie them.  For example, you may have applied to KAEF because you wanted a top-notch education, but why did you want that?  Why is that education important to you, particularly in the field which you chose?  The answers to these questions may seem obvious to you at first glance, but if you spend some time thinking about it, I believe you will see that there is a complicated web of reasons behind your decision to apply for KAEF (or, in fact, almost any decision you make).  That, ultimately, is what we as interviewers are interested in – not only about why you want to become a KAEF fellow, but also about why you want to study at a particular institution, in a particular field; about why you want to pursue a particular career; about why you hold a particular opinion.

This kind of preparation is easy.  Think of an idea  or an opinion that is likely to come up in the interview.  Then ask yourself why you have that idea or that opinion.  You will come up with more ideas and more opinions.  Ask yourself why you hold those ideas.  You will get more ideas – and ask yourself why you hold those, and so on and so forth, for as long as you can.  (You may want to enlist the help of a 4 or 5 year-old in this process.  They are very good at always asking the question, “Why?”)

This mental exercise will prepare you for the kind of self-justification we will ask of you in the interview itself.

Yes, as promised, today I am going to unveil for everyone the CORRECT ANSWERS TO THE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. I have to say I’m very excited about it.

So, without any additional fanfare, here we go – the correct answers to the KAEF interview questions:

There are no correct answers.

No, really.

There are incorrect answers, certainly, but I very rarely hear them.  An example of an incorrect answer would be something that disqualifies a candidate based on the program criteria.  For example, one of our criteria is that our candidates are “habitual residents of Kosovo.”  So this following (hypothetical) exchange would represent an incorrect answer:

Q: Here in your application you list two addresses – one here in Prishtina, and one in Tirana.  Could you explain that?

A: Ah, yes, well, I live and work in Tirana, but I have a legal address here in Prishtina for tax reasons.

INCORRECT.

So there are “incorrect” answers in this limited sense.  However, I have to tell you, these answers are extremely rare. In my three years of KAEF interviews I have not heard a single “incorrect” answer, for a very good reason:  most candidates who were strictly ineligible have already been eliminated from the competition by the time of the interviews.

So we’re left with my original assertion that there is no such thing as a “correct” (or “incorrect”) answer. This is the honest truth.  Let me explain a little.

When we ask a question – say, something like, “What would you say are the three main problems facing the economy of Kosova today?” – we may have our own opinions regarding those questions, BUT – and this is a big “but” – we absolutely do not bring those opinions to bear in evaluating your answers. If I, Nathan Truitt, think that one of the problems facing Kosova’s economy is the lack of strong laws on intellectual property, and you don’t list that as one of your answers, you in no way are penalized for that.

In other words, we do not evaluate the claims you make in the interview according to their truth value. So how do we evaluate your ideas?

We evaluate your ideas based upon the reasons you provide in advancing them. We are interested in the process by which you arrive at your opinions. Are you simply repeating the opinions of others verbatim?  Are you, on the other hand, constructing your ideas without taking other people’s opinions into account?  Or are you creating a synthesis between the received wisdom and your own experience?

So what you say is significantly less important than your reasons for saying it. The “what” is not important; the “why” is paramount.  You can say something that I profoundly disagree with – you can even advance an idea that I think is silly and false – but if you can explain why you came to believe it, I will evaluate your answer more positively than an answer in which you said something I agreed with, but were unable to explain why.

Why do we evaluate answers in this way?

Because this is the talent that will be required of you in graduate school – the ability to look beyond the simple content of a statement (“America is a great country”) to the premises and criteria upon which that statement is based (“What constitutes greatness?  To what extent has America met the criteria of greatness as a nation?  Is it even possible to label an abstract concept like a nation as possessing greatness as an intrinsic quality, apart from its actions?”)

If you can show us this talent in your answers, then regardless of the content your answers represent, we will evaluate you positively.

I hope this is clear.  As always, feel free to ask questions in the “Comments” section of the blog!

Tomorrow we will talk about preparing for the interview.  See you then!

In a later post we’ll talk about preparing for the interview.  One of the things that would be very helpful in preparing would be to know what questions the interviewers were going to ask.  Well, I’m going to tell you.  Or at least I’m going to tell you how you can figure that out.

First, let me talk a little about the types of questions we’ll ask and where those questions come from.  We’ll basically ask two distinct types of questions:  (1) program related questions, which address your readiness and aptitude for KAEF in a broad sense; and (2) field specific questions, which will probe your knowledge and ideas in the subject area for which you are applying.  The first set of questions have to do with your fit with the KAEF program, and the second with your readiness to enter specific graduate institutions in the U.S.

For both sets of questions, the interviewers have what we refer to as a question bank. This is a list of questions that tend to elicit useful answers from participants. Note that they are not required questions.  In many cases, interviewers will ask only one or two questions from the question bank, and will then restrict themselves to follow up questions.

In addition, since the interviewers will have reviewed you application prior to the interview, they may have specific questions about something on your resume, something you wrote on your essay, etc.

Now, let me tell you right now, so as not to prolong any anticipation – I can not actually tell you any of the questions that are in the question bank.  But what I can do is tell you the process by which we arrive at those questions.  From there, you should be able to have a good understanding of the kind of questions we’ll be asking. I’ll do this through a hypothetical example.

So, let’s say that I was administering a program that gave individuals grants in order for them to clean up the parks in my (imaginary) city of Nateopolis.  I want to make sure that the money I give in grants is used effectively, and in deciding what grants to give I might think about the following criteria:

1. Grants must actually address the problem – namely, that our parks are unclean.
2. Grants must be realistic - they must be able to do what they say they will do.
3. Grants must be flexible - able to imagine problems and solutions to those problems
4. Grantees – the people that get the grant – must demonstrate some kind of record of having succeeded in the past in a project that has some bearing on their current proposal.

If I were to have interviews with the various people who applied for a grant, I would then be able to generate a list of questions to investigate each of these criteria.  For example, to explore whether a grant proposal met criteria one (whether it addressed the problem), I might ask:

• How does this grant accomplish the goal of the program – namely, cleaning up the parks?
• Why do you need this grant in order to accomplish your goal?  Why couldn’t you clean up the parks without this grant?

Simple, right?  For criteria two (whether a grant is realistic), I might ask:

• What are the challenges you will face in cleaning up the parks, and how might you address those challenges?

For criteria three (flexibility), I might ask:

• What are your expectations of how this project will proceed?  What if those expectations are not met?  How will you react?

For criteria four (record of past performance), I might ask:

• Please give me an example of how you’ve administered a grant in the past?  What lessons did you learn from that experience?
• What experiences in your past make you confident in your ability to succeed with your grant?

You get the idea.  So, in order to anticipate the kind of questions you’ll be asked in the KAEF interview, here’s what you do:  go back to www.kaef-online.org, and read as much as you can about the program, its goals, its history, etc.  Then ask yourself, given that KAEF values candidates who show a, b and c, what kind of questions would they ask in order to see whether I have those qualities?  If we valued physical height in our candidates, for example, you could expect us to ask something like, “How do you plan to increase your height before, during, and after the KAEF program?”

Now, in this way you can anticipate the program related questions.  Field-specific questions, on the other hand, can’t be extrapolated in this way.  That’s OK – it’s actually easier to anticipate field-specific questions.  Basically, when we ask you these kind of questions, we’re going to be looking for two things:

1. Your knowledge of your field.
2. Your ability to apply that knowledge to specific issues and circumstances.

For example, if you were applying in Elizabethan Literature, we might ask:

1. What would you say are the main themes Shakespeare attempts to address in his great tragedies – Othello, Lear, Hamlet and MacBeth?
2. How are these themes relevant to today’s cultural situation, if at all?

If you know about English Literature, these questions will be easy to answer.  In fact, you probably won’t need to prepare for them at all, since you already know enough about your field!

Using the above guidance, I hope that you’ll be able to paint a pretty good picture of the kind of questions we might ask during your interview.  Remember, if you have any specific questions, PLEASE PUT THEM IN THE COMMENTS FOR THIS POST, and I will answer them.

One final important note:  in the above post I’ve talked about anticipating the kinds of questions you might get.  This is a good activity to engage in, and should be part of your preparation.  As you’re riding on the bus, laying in bed, brushing your teeth, or whatever, it would be a great idea to imagine how you might answer these types of questions.  However, it will not be very useful to try to literally anticipate EVERY SINGLE QUESTION we might ask.  For one thing, the question bank is very big and the chances of you guessing all of the questions that might be in it are very, very small.  For another thing, I can guarantee you we will ask at least one question that you will not expect – and the majority of our questions will actually be in response to something you yourself say.  For this reason, it’s better to think about the broad types of questions and subjects you might encounter, rather than trying to guess the specific questions themselves.

Today’s topic is the so-called “superficialities” of the interview – by which I mean things like how you dress, whether you are punctual, etc.  A lot of information you can find on the web about interviewing consists of advice about what to do and what not to do in an interview setting.  A good deal of that advice revolves around the issue of how your present yourself nonverbally. And the basic premise of much of this advise seems to be that if you do not take the utmost care to sculpt and manage your appearance and bearing, then somehow the interviewers won’t take you seriously (or, worse, will be offended!)

This is overstating it, I think.  Let me be honest:  as an interviewer, I don’t consciously care about any of that – about what you wear, whether you’re on time, how straight you sit in your chair, whether you make eye contact, the volume of your voice, and so on.  On a conscious level, I am interested in one thing and one thing only:  are you a qualified candidate for the program?

However, it is almost certainly the case that at some subconscious level I – along with every human – am affected by those very same aspects of the interview that I consciously try not to care about.  If someone came into the interview wearing dirty jeans, for example, I would tell myself that this did not matter; but I think that I would probably treat the candidate’s answers with less seriousness, without realizing that I was doing so. This is just human nature.

So what can we take away from this?  when we talk about strategies for having a successful interview, you do not need to stress about every little detail (is my shirt properly ironed?  Am I sitting up straight enough?  AM I making enough eye contact?  Too much eye contact?).  In fact, thinking about things in this way will probably have a negative impact, because you’ll be so worried about these “superficialities” that you will distract yourself from the substance of your answers.

Instead, before your interview, simply look at yourself in the mirror, and (I know this sounds a little strange) practice talking about yourself and your application.  Then, after you’ve done this, just ask yourself, “Do I look like I might be a graduate student at aU.S. university?”  If the answer is “yes,” you don’t need to worry any more about it.  If the answer is “no” – and it almost certainly won’t be – you might want to spend a small amount of time thinking about the following:

• Clothes - are you dressed professionally?  This doesn’t mean you need to be dressed formally (suit and tie, for example).  It means you need to be dressed in a way that shows that you take yourself and the interview process seriously.
• Posture - does the way that you are standing / sitting project confidence?
• Eye contact – are you maintaining eye contact with the questioner?  (Of course, in this case, the questioner is yourself, which will be weird, but still, try practicing eye contact)
• Fidgeting - are you making strange, repetitive motions with your hands or with other parts of your body?  Many people, when nervous, develop distracting hand motions.  If you’re doing something like this, the best way to avoid it is simply to fold your hands together and keep them in your lap.

So, bottom line – don’t worry too much about this.  As long as you take very basic, common sense steps in regards to the way your present yourself, the “superficialities” aren’t going to matter one way or the other.  A better use of your time is to focus on preparing for the substance of the interview, and it is to that topic that we will turn next week, starting Monday.